Dominiek.com

Every once in a while you need to have a great out-of-reality experience. Labyrinth - a Japanese psychedelic trance festival - is an annual opportunity to do this. Labyrinth is a four day event organized by the Mindgames organization and my colleague, the Monk, is it's founder. It is held in the town of Kawaba in the mountains north of Tokyo in the Gunma province. The nearest train station is about 30 minutes by car. (By the way, Kawaba has nice local products, especially their wine)

I have been to psychedelic trance parties in Amsterdam in the past, but none of them were as great as this one. The mix of forest, mountains an oriental country is a great experience. I can only imagine how the parties in the middle of the Moroccan desert would be like.

Another thing that's really nice about these events in Japan is the people. Most people are Japanese and they are very well mannered. Also, the atmosphere is more bohemian since it's a safe camping environment so many people bring their children.

The best thing about these parties is that they are an escape from your normal life. A break from reality even.

As the Singularity can be found anywhere, it can also be found at Labyrinth. Going out there in the nature, far away from technology packed Tokyo. What do we bring? Some blankets, candles, incense and clothing. But we also bring: Huge speakers, electrical spots and chemicals. What do we do?

We unite with nature.

A lot of people might see it as distorting nature, like two opposites. But as a singularitarian, I truly believe that all this techno distortion is part of biology and evolution.

More importantly, it's an awesome experience!

Last Thursday was the second RubyOnRails conference in the Netherlands. Conveniently, it was four minutes walking from my apartment in Amsterdam. RubyEnRails was organized and sponsored by recruitment companies that have RubyOnRails fever. The main sponsor was Adnexus the company by Brett Dawkins, a very active Dutch RoR scener.

Conference day

The conference was opened by Dr Nic Williams who gave two nice lectures that day. I knew Dr Nic because he has a nice blog and made nice comments about my Shuriken script. It appears Dr Nic is very fond of extending the syntax of Ruby by using 'magic' tricks like methodmissing or constmissing.

There were about 200 people at the conference. There was a mixed audience of PHP developers, Java developers and Sysop gothics. Also there was a fair percentage of recruiters, some of them with no clue. What really surprised me was the low amount of people that had actual production experience with rails. I suspect there weren't more than 20. During the lunch break, Dr Nic even admitted that he codes Java for a living.

Interesting cases

There were two interesting real-life cases nonetheless:

• Wakoopa.com, a 'what software do you use' social networking site by Robert Gaal (blueace.nl)
• Nedap's MovesOnRails, a health-care planning application by the Dutch Devices Factory Corp (Nederlandse Apparatenfabriek).

Also, I had a fruitful conversation with the director of Nedforce, someone who really does have a clue.

Noted techniques

These are some things that I heard and are more or less new to me:

• BackgrounDRB a distrubuted ruby job scheduler for rails
• Asset Packager a rails plugin that compresses your CSS/JavaScript
• multi-page (MovesOnRails) They invented this thing that allows you to navigate your layouts like a book. Still waiting for some code though.

Noted tools

• monit server monitoring tool
• munin server monitoring tool
• pingdom.com server monitoring tool 2.0, with SMS notification which is nice for in Europe
• mailroom a webapp that facilitates mail interaction with team and customers (not quite sure what it is yet, but people like it)

Nintendo Wiiii bakatachiiiiiii :-)